Strange Zones: Science Fiction, Fantasy & the Posthuman City

Strange zones: Science fiction, fantasy & the posthuman city Debra Benita Shaw ABSTRACT Science fiction has long been concerned with imagining cities of the future but contemporary 'posturban' cities are 'strange zones' where the future has already happened. How we live in these spaces is a challenge to accepted ideas about what it means to be human and, indeed, what it means to have a future. How then can critical urban theory engage with the new definitions of 'life' emerging from the biological sciences and their effects in urban space? Drawing on theories of posthumanism, this paper explores the contemporary city through a reading of China Miéville's fantasy novel Perdido Street Station which explores the imaginative potential of monsters and magic for developing new and resistant metropolitan mythologies. Keywords: posthuman, posturban, radical fantasy ---------------------------------------------------------------- Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta... (Gibson, 1986: 57) William Gibson's 1985 science fiction1 novel Neuromancer introduced the city as virtual space; as a space produced in and through the 'consensual hallucination' (Gibson, 1986: 67) of what he now famously termed 'cyberspace'. Gibson's achievement, arguably, was to fictionalise a growing cultural anxiety about the place of the body in the world of advanced capitalism where the networks of flexible accumulation were threatening the dissolution of the boundaries through which space had been traditionally understood. At the same time, however, Neuromancer (and other novels emerging from the 'cyberpunk' stable) inaugurated a departure from the stock SF engagement with outer space and other worlds. When Henry Case, Gibson's drug addled hacker protagonist 'fell into the prison of his own flesh' (12), SF fell back to earth and discovered that the retrofitted cyborg body, imagined by 1960s NASA projections to be the future for space travelling humans bound for extraterrestrial colonisation2, was emerging as the model for late twentieth-century terrestrial ontologies. This paper is a contribution to critical urban theory which takes as its basic premise that both bodies and the way that they inhabit urban space are profoundly affected by what Donna J Haraway has called 'the social relations of science and technology' (1991: 163). While contemporary science re-writes bodies as post-organic assemblages of viral, genetic and bacteriological data, the criteria which have previously secured a distinction between humans and other animals and humans and machines are proving increasingly unstable, to the extent that accepted cartographies of both bodies and cities are brought into doubt. As Elizabeth Grosz reminds us, bodies and cities are mutually constitutive (1995: 103 - 110). What, then, are the political possibilities of conceiving of ourselves as 'posthuman'? And how might new fictions of urban space which engage with divergent ontologies, contribute to thinking social relations differently? SF itself has somewhat retreated from the ontological challenge posed by contemporary scientific discourse; a retreat marked by the rise of steampunk, an alternate history sub- genre that, while imaginatively re-working the history of 'people and things', nevertheless, as Stafania Forlini points out, tends towards an 'idealisation of mastery' which 'risks re- inscribing the values of liberal humanism onto posthumanism' (2010: 73). It will be my argument here that a more fruitful fictional resource for working through the complexities of new concepts of both bodies and space is provided by the work of China Miéville, which dissolves the boundaries between SF and fantasy while, at the same time, self consciously engaging with the politics of lived metropolitan reality. As I will demonstrate, Miéville's work is marked by a teratology of hybridity. This enables it to be read as proposing a radical re- engagement with those things outside the conceptual map of modernity which might point the way to performing new cartographies of the urban for posthuman selves. First, however, I would like to make a case for the necessity of thinking the space of the city through a posthuman frame of reference. Strange Zones Neil Brenner argues that contemporary economic and social conditions require a re- thinking of 'the institutional conditions of possibility for … critical social theory' (2009: 205) alongside an understanding of the necessity for its ''urbanistic' reorientation' (206). Brenner offers four propositions for how the methodologies and orientations of critical urban theory should be broadly understood. Consistent with the Frankfurt School approach to the analysis of culture under prevailing economic and social conditions, critical urban theory is concerned with developing abstract arguments which can elucidate 'the nature of urban processes under capitalism', coupled with an understanding of these processes as expressions of power relations under specific historical conditions. These techniques are brought to bear on critiquing and rejecting 'market-driven forms of urban analysis' and excavating radical urban forms 'that are latent, yet systematically suppressed, within contemporary cities' (204). It is this last with which I am particularly concerned and which cyberpunk explored, concerned, as it was, with the zones where 'the street finds its own uses for things' (Gibson, 1995: 215). But cyberpunk's often problematic relationship with the flesh and its material needs3 tended towards an accordance with the idea of the posthuman as only ever intelligible through a disassociation between the mind and body. As I will demonstrate, the latent possibilities of the city can be explored for their potential to expose the radical promise of the posthuman only if we take into account the way that bodies, and their structuring through scientific discourses, are fundamental to the way that the urban has been understood and that the social reproduction of the human is an effect of cognitive mapping produced, and sustained, by the arrangements of urban space. Returning to Gibson's invitation to 'program a map…' we can see that, as 'certain blocks in midtown Manhattan' and 'hundred-year-old industrial parks' come into view, the city as a recognised centre of administrative and political power recedes and is replaced by a series of what Giorgio Agamben calls 'strange zones... where it is impossible to decide what is private and what is public' (2008). Strange zones emerge where public space has been sold into corporate ownership; where the open spaces and streets of the city are controlled by surveillance and rules of access. They are also the zones that Gibson identifies where accepted distinctions between public and private no longer make sense because the non- presence of electronic communication has superseded the presence of the body as a determinant of urban organisation. This gives rise to what the architectural theorist Anthony Vidler calls 'posturbanism' (1992: 177), a term also employed by Sarah Chaplin and Eric Holding (2002) to refer to the hyperrealisation of urban space or its production as abstract space (Lefebvre, 1974). In this sense, part of what Agamben calls the 'group of dispositifs' which construct urban subjectivities are dependent on media representations which draw on mythical histories and affective characterisations to attract tourism and investment. Posturbanism signifies the passing of modernist utopian projections which built monuments to a future that would never be and thus the end of a particular form of urban anticipation, often exemplified by SF scenarios. Thus, cyberpunk can be seen to have marked the passing of what Jean Baudrillard calls SF's 'pantographic exuberance' (1991) and a recognition that the posturban condition required a re-imagining of metropolitan social space. Agamben refers to the posturban city as 'metropolis ... a space where a huge process of creation of subjectivity is taking place'. It is this process which Agamben believes we need to understand, not on the level of economic or social structures but 'the ontological level or Spinozian level that puts under question the subjects' ability/power to act'. For Agamben, metropolis has a specific meaning. He uses the term to differentiate between the ancient Greek polis or political city and 'the new urban fabric' which emerged with the shift to modern biopower or governmentality as defined by Michel Foucault. In other words, the question is to be posed in terms of how contemporary urban forms (including, but not necessarily restricted to, architecture) produce and are produced by the action of discourse on bodies and how techniques which characterise urban life are internalised in the process of subject formation. Vidler refers to the relationship between the 'real city and the utopian city' as 'mediated by a mental map that includes the real in order to imagine the unreal, the ideal, or simply that which has to be remembered' (1992: 179). My response to Agamben's call for an analysis of metropolis as 'a dispositif or a

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